UCI Official Brings AIDS Out of Hiding

David Souleles pushed aside a sheaf of pamphlets on AIDS and dug into a cardboard box filled with hundreds of foil-wrapped, golden disks.

At first glance, they looked like play money, or maybe expensive chocolates.

Souleles knew better.

“These are great condoms,” he said cheerfully, tossing several of the Golden Circle prophylactics onto a table. “I think of them as the yuppie condoms. They make me think of gold coins, and yuppies carrying them in their purses.”

As the $27,000-a-year director of UC Irvine’s AIDS Education project, Souleles would be delighted if he could convince students to carry condoms with their pocket change.

But as long as he can get the campus to think and talk about preventing AIDS, that’s half the battle, he said.

In his 4 1/2 years at UCI--the first four as an undergraduate psychology major and gay student activist and now as UCI’s first full-time AIDS educator--Souleles, 22, has generated plenty of talk.

Among his credits:

He put the Golden Circle condoms in candy dishes at the UCI student support services office. “People giggle and laugh about them,” Souleles said, but the device is an icebreaker, enabling student counselors to mention the need for preventing AIDS in a discussion about housing or new student services.

He helped persuade the university to install condom vending machines in men’s and women’s restrooms in 23 buildings on campus. That way, students don’t have to face embarrassment in stores, Souleles said.

He produces posters and pamphlets on AIDS awareness, has compiled his own small research library about AIDS and regularly leads 90-minute seminars--”AIDS 101”-- for students, faculty and staff. Typically, the seminars include a short videotape about the disease, a briefing on AIDS transmission and the blood test for the AIDS virus, and a discussion of myths about AIDS.

He chairs the College AIDS Committee, composed of health educators and student representatives from nine Orange County campuses. The committee is planning an AIDS Awareness Week Nov. 2 through 8 that will feature lectures and videotapes on AIDS.

“Just because you’re educated doesn’t mean you understand the current issues about AIDS,” said Souleles, who has fielded questions from students worried that they could get AIDS from a mosquito bite, in a Jacuzzi or from a sneeze. (Actually, the virus that transmits the deadly acquired immune deficiency disease is spread through an exchange of bodily fluids, either by intimate sexual contact or by the sharing of hypodermic needles.)

Souleles knows of only two students and two staff members on the 15,000-student campus who have contracted the disease. But he said his full-time job is “not an over-reaction” to the threat.

“Because the incubation period for AIDS is from two to five years and the average student is only here four years, we may well never see large numbers of AIDS cases in our student population,” Souleles said. “But the pool of people who could eventually become infected is large.”

UCI Associate Dean Bob Gentry said hiring Souleles was a preventive move by the university, which is one of the largest employers in Orange County.

“Knowing that there are now about 500 cases (of AIDS in the county) and by 1991 it may get as high as 2,000, I thought we’d better prepare, just like we prepare for other kinds of emergencies, an earthquake or whatever. David is a resource for any manager, all employees and all students,” Gentry said.